Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I first want to begin by thanking the
chairman of the Subcommittee on Homeland Security of the Committee on
Appropriations and the chairman of the full Appropriations Committee,
the gentlemen from Texas and Kentucky, for their excellent work on this
legislation.

It is important that we pass it, and it is important that we use the
power of the purse in this process to stop the President's unconstitutional
actions.

President Obama has embarked on some of the biggest executive power
grabs in American history by unilaterally rewriting our Nation's
immigration laws. These actions ignore the will of the American people
who voted in November to change the way Washington operates, and these
actions flout the United States Constitution.

They must be ended because these policies threaten the separation of
powers between Congress and the executive branch and violate President
Obama's obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

Congress must fight to stop these unconstitutional actions from being
implemented, and today, the House of Representatives is doing just
that. We will consider amendments to this bill that will stop President
Obama's executive overreach in its tracks.

Two of the amendments will completely defund President Obama's
executive power grabs. One offered by Representatives Robert Aderholt,
Mick Mulvaney, and Lou Barletta will defund the President's new
deferred action program for over 4 million unlawful alien parents. It
will also defund the other executive actions he announced on November
20 and DHS' so-called prosecutorial discretion memos that have gutted
immigration enforcement within the United States.

Importantly, in addition to barring the use of appropriated funds to
carry out these policies, the amendment will bar President Obama from
using immigration user fees, the filing fees to accomplish his
executive fiat, and it will prevent him and subsequent Presidents from
carrying out similar policies in the future by whatever means, whether
it be by memo, executive order, or regulation.

The other defunding amendment, offered by Representative Marsha
Blackburn, completely defunds DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals program, that has granted deferred action and work
authorization to hundreds of thousands of unlawful aliens.

The third amendment will be offered by Representatives DeSantis and
Roby. It will ensure that sex offenders and domestic violence
perpetrators are top priorities for removal by U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, something that is not the case in this current
administration under the President's memos.

The fourth amendment will be offered by Representative Schock. It
expresses the sense of Congress that the Obama administration should
stop putting the interests of unlawful aliens ahead of legal
immigrants.

Under the President's DACA program, legal immigrants playing by the
rules and seeking to come to the United States the right way have paid
the price; they have faced longer wait times even though they have paid
the fees to have their applications processed and seeing those fees
diverted to pay for people who entered the country unlawfully.

The fifth amendment will be offered by Representatives Salmon and
Thompson. It expresses the sense of Congress that U.S. workers should
not be harmed by the granting of deferred action and work authorization
to unlawful aliens.

In many cases, businesses now have a $3,000 incentive to hire an
alien granted DACA benefits over a U.S. citizen or legal immigrant
worker, since DACA recipients are not eligible for ObamaCare. So, in
other words, an employer has an incentive, either not having to provide
health insurance and not having to pay the fine, so a minimum of $3,000
if they hire somebody who is not lawfully present in the United States
until the President's executive memos take effect. That should be
stopped.

If President Obama's unilateral immigration amendments are not
stopped, future Presidents will continue to expand the power of the
executive branch and encroach upon individual liberty.

The time is now for Congress to take a stand against these abusive
actions. I urge my colleagues to support this bill and these important
amendments and yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source